The
following is an interview with David
Pinder, the
author of Visions of the City: Utopianism,
Power and Politics in Twentiety-Century Urbanism, in
conversation with Bob
Biderman,
the editor of Visions of the City Magazine, held
in November 2007.

What
I liked most about your book was your refusal to accept
what’s easy to fall into, the idea that dystopia
is a far more relevant analytical tool for addressing cities
than utopia (which smacks of sugarplums and fairy dust).
Why does it currently seem so hard to take utopian visions
seriously? What might be the value of re-evaluating and
re-awakening utopian imaginations?

One of the difficulties of talking about utopias today
is that, as you hint, they can seem too fanciful
or irrelevant
in the context of current urban problems. They can appear
like a distraction from facing up to the realities of contemporary
cities with all their inequalities and multiple crises
of deprivation, violence, political oppression and
the such.
In this context it’s easy to see why dystopias might
be seen as more relevant, timely and imaginable, with their
concern about puncturing current complacencies and underlining
the urgency of responding radically to current economic,
political and cultural conditions and trends. Another difficulty
about utopias, almost the obverse from the other one, is
that they are frequently dismissed for being authoritarian
or even totalitarian, for supposedly setting up a fixed ideal
to which society must be then molded. Many critics have therefore
assailed utopias and utopian thought for being repressive
and murderous, as being to blame for many of the horrors
of the twentieth century and as necessarily becoming dystopian
in its results. As a consequence there’s been much
talk of the ‘end of utopia’ alongside concerted
efforts to convince, as Margaret Thatcher famously put it,
and as many in positions of power have continued to echo,
that ‘there is no alternative’ to present economic
and political arrangements.

It was in that broad context that I wanted to reconsider
utopian visions of cities from twentieth-century Europe.
Partly this was to examine critically influential strands
of utopianism that have done much to shape the discourses
and practices of modern urban planning and architecture,
and consequently the building of actual cities. This led
me to explore their politics, desires and ‘dark sides’,
if you like, against tendencies to see them as ‘technical’ interventions.
But I also wanted to draw out contrasting utopian visions – what
might be described as ‘counter-traditions’ – with
which they were entangled, and which sought quite different
routes. Here my focus was on the surrealists and especially
the situationists as well as figures such as the philosopher
Henri Lefebvre. To speak of their positions as utopian clearly
involves moving away from the idea that utopianism is necessarily
about projecting plans and blueprints. It requires recognising
that it takes different forms and can have different functions – as
critique, as the education of desire, as a striving to expand
senses of possibility, as a catalyst for social change. It
can also be rooted in everyday life and spaces, and in the
desire to transform them for the better. In the book I try
to contextualise the ideas and practices historically and
geographically but at the same time my aim, in returning
to aspects of the recent past, is to focus attention on utopianism
and its potential functions for enabling radical change.
In so doing I’ve also been influenced by the reconceptualisation
of utopianism that’s been going on within utopian studies.
Like a number of people involved with that, my historical
interest in studying utopias is connected with an interest
in advocating it as an approach and method for thinking about
alternatives.

In
all great movements of art, philosophy, literature
isn’t there a reaction to hurt and injustice
and a craving for a world made anew? A craving for
utopia? Not in the literal sense of the word – the
sense that is used in ordinary dialogue. More the sense
in which you
use it - as a signpost, a marker, something to aim
for. Don’t
all great movements come from despair and seek some
sort of solace?

That
often seems the case. John Holloway, the political theorist
and activist, writes about
how radical
theory starts
with ‘a
scream’, a sense of anger and horror at the state of
the world, a feeling that things are not right and just.
It proceeds from that gut instinct rather than a detached,
contemplative position. In much utopianism the urge to negate
is coupled with the desire for things to be different and
better: the sense that something’s missing and that
the world should and can be changed. In that desire for change
there’s not only despair and the search for solace,
then, but also at least the flicker of hope. That’s
important if utopias are to include a willful drive to make
a difference and be more than compensatory. Certainly, in
the urban tradition, the terrible conditions of cities have
often been a spur not only to reformist action but also for
utopian projects. I think there’s a risk, though, of
romanticising conditions of hurt and despair as the spur
to ‘great works’. When thinking about political
movements there’s also a question of the sources, for
example, of the surge of utopian thinking within leftist
movements in North America and Europe during the 1960s. Alongside
the struggles against war and for civil rights there’s
a real sense of optimism in attempts to seize and realize
the possibilities of the times.

Visions
are – have been, certainly after Einstein – relativistic.
You have a wonderful bit where you compare the first vision
of New York, seen from afar, by Le Corbusier and Dali. Dali
sees it as a great hunk of Roquefort and Corbusier sees it
as the white city. Both are right and both are wrong. (I
love it when you talk about – or Dali talks about – the
great towers in New York being sprayed with scum so they
were able to fit in with the sooty appearance that defined
Manhattan while in Paris, the towers were built glistening
white to conform to their idealized image of modern New York.
That says a lot about competing utopias.) But that also is
New York seen naively from afar. Seen from within, there
were my grandparents living in a Delancey Street tenement.
Their abode was seen as dirty, cruel and nasty by those who
lived uptown. But to my grandparents, who came from even
worse conditions and saw America as their utopian dream,
the tenements were home. They were a sanctuary. To Corbusier
it was simply a slum to be hopefully replaced someday by
a gleaming tower if he had anything to do with it.

Yes,
when someone like Le Corbusier – or, in the same
New York context but wielding more practical power, someone
like the public works commissioner Robert Moses – denounces
urban disorder and calls for the creation of order, it’s
important to ask whose order? Whose interests are to be served?
Who is to be on the receiving end when Moses makes his notorious
comment, ‘When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis,
you have to hack your way with a meat axe’? What you
say about the disparity between perpectives brings to mind
the famous attack on urban planning by Jane Jacobs in her
book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, from 1961.
Writing in New York and targeting the utopian schemes of
people like Le Corbusier, Howard and the City Beautiful Movement
that she saw as having a disastrous influence on planning
practice at the time, she argued they failed to recognize
the intricate order and pattern of daily life in the city
streets. They ignored or suppressed that as they sought to
impose their own abstract conceptualizations of order. Attending
to that street life was an important basis of her resistance
to Moses, then remaking the city with his highway constructions.

I find it fascinating that you used Lefebvre
and Constant as your guides through the utopian miasma.
The COBRA group,
of which I suspect Lefebvre was an honorary member, was one
of the most important and little studied post-war artistic
movements leaving hardly a mark in the English speaking world.
What I loved about COBRA is how they separated themselves
off from the mainstream of European intelligentsia and tried
to find their own path. I go to the COBRA museum in Amstelveen
like some people go to Lourdes or Mecca. My feeling about
COBRA, however, is that it’s very
much rooted in the resistance struggles during WWII. Those
who survived the traumas went on to demand the world be made
anew. There was a harking back to the innocence of childhood.
Line, shape and form were all re-envisioned. The boundaries
of genre were removed. Poetry, painting, sculpture were interwoven.
But they were there and then they weren’t. How long
was it? Five, six, seven years? No matter. They weren’t
to be institutionalised. (They didn’t seek immortality.)
But they certainly had their effect on Amsterdam – if
only though the Stedelijk (or what’s left of it). How
about Copenhagen? Or Brussels? Is there a residual memory
that permeates through, even though the culture shifts and
time dulls the senses?

I’ve similarly long been struck by the lack of attention
that COBRA has received in English-speaking contexts, beyond
the notable work of a few art historians such as Graham Birtwistle
and Peter Shield. It’s a remarkable movement whose
formal existence actually spanned only 1948 to 1951, although
it does seem longer. When a large-scale exhibition finally
came to Britain in 2002, it visited the Baltic gallery at
Gateshead but tellingly never made it further south before
its passage to Dublin. I keep wondering when the UK will
see a major exhibition on, for example, Jorn not to mention
Constant. There’s a small group of COBRA paintings
in the Tate Modern in London that includes Constant’s ‘Après
nous la liberté’, from 1949. Interestingly in
terms of our conversation here, Constant originally entitled
it ‘To us, liberty’. But after the break up of
COBRA and his own disillusionment about the prospects of ‘free
art’ within the oppressive conditions of post-war capitalist
society, he gave it the present title. In the process he
was clearly not giving up on the prospects of freedom but
viewing them as dependent upon a revolutionary break with
current conditions that was itself within reach, something
that he went on to explore and seek to encourage through
his extraordinary utopian New Babylon project that occupied
him throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, and that was a key
focus of my book.

I, too, love visiting the COBRA museum. The Jorn museum at
Silkeborg is also wonderful. Having said that, my own interest
in COBRA is especially in its aftermath and what became of
some of its protagonists, in particular Constant as he forged
a new path during the 1950s that left behind individualised
models of painting that eventually led him back into contact
with Jorn, first through the latter’s International
Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus and then through the Situationist
International. In relation to the latter group, the neglect
of COBRA movement in English speaking settings that you refer
to has been matched by sidelining of the Scandinavian wing
of the situationist movement and the so-called Second Situationist
International. While the Guy Debord has become the subject
of numerous biographical studies, the roles in the movement
of situationists such as Jorn, Jacqueline de Jong, J.V. Martin,
Jørgen Nash and others have received little attention.
I hope that will soon change and there are signs it will.
There was a conference this year in Copenhagen on the Scandinavian
situationists, for example, and in Britain Stewart Home and
Fabian Tompsett have been strong advocates for the significance
of Jorn and the Second Situationist International from outside
academia, publishing during the 1990s some of his short situationist-era
texts.

How can we gauge the impact of such figures and movements
on particular places? Many of the effects are no doubt subterranean
and indirect although nonetheless important for that. Even
when ideas and movements seem to lie dormant or suppressed,
they may re-emerge or be re-awakened as they chime with different
contexts or are mobilized for other purposes. Ten years after
Constant finished work on New Babylon and went back to painting,
he gave a talk that looked back on his utopian urban project,
which he noted was now ‘safely stored away in a museum,
waiting for more favourable times when it will once again
arouse interest’. This might seem a resigned statement
about the co-optation by the artistic establishment of a
project that was clearly meant to go beyond such institutions,
to be part of revolutionary movements. But I also take it
as an invitation to think about what the work might mean
to us today. How might it be approached in ways that don’t
simply deaden its utopian spirit? To what new projects might
the histories of such endeavours speak? What might we make
of his insistence, and the prodigious artistic energy that
he devoted to this end, that other urban worlds and ways
of living are possible?

One issue within academic studies of these materials is that,
due to disciplinary specialisms, the ‘art historical’ or ‘architectural’ interests
at times get separated from the social theoretical and from
the political. That’s why I think it’s valuable
to link Constant and Lefebvre together, for example, not
only due to the historical links and cross-currents of influences
between them, but also because it helps to keep in focus
their radical political commitments. The geographer Erik
Swyngedouw talks of the ‘strange respectability of
the situationist city in the society of the spectacle’ and
of the ways in which a profoundly revolutionary project has
become part of academic and art establishment discourse.
He’s right, of course, and it’s something that
I’ve often thought about in writing on these matters
myself. Yet it’s also the case that these ideas and
practices are in increasingly wide circulation, and addressing
them and considering what to make of them are not insignificant
matters. They are certainly not ‘dead’ and coming
to terms with their histories is of political as well as
intellectual importance.

London, of course, is a fascinating city that
defies straightforward analysis. I took a French friend
who was
visiting from Paris
to the café atop the Tate Modern so that he might
appreciate how truly ugly London could appear. His response
was that the architectural chaos and helter-skelter planning
was a pleasant antidote to the tedious symmetry you see from
atop the Eiffel Tower. Does this theme of order vs chaos
or symmetry vs randomization play a major role in all utopian
ideas? And do any utopian ideas incorporate both?

Many utopian visions of cities are indeed calls to order.
They often focus, in particular, on spatial order as a means
of dealing with social and urban problems more widely. We
were just referring to Le Corbusier and how his urban schemes
from the 1920s and 1930s most vividly embody the demands
to clean up, reorder, purify. But so do many others, including
in a more gentle way the garden city of Ebenezer Howard.
Expel wastes and pollutants that would compromise the integrity
of the new spaces, get rid of contaminations and chaotic
intrusions. Part of the reason why such visions have been
so powerful is their appeal to apparently universal, timeless
values of geometry, symmetry and visual clarity as well as
their use of organic metaphors whereby their actions become
a way of restoring health and wholeness to the ravaged urban
body. But again a vital question is whose order?

The landscape in Paris that your friend reacts negatively
to is, of course, the result in part of the grand public
works under Haussmann, which involved blasting boulevards
through the old working class districts and demolishing medieval
quarters in the 1850s and 1860 with the aim of opening up
and reordering the city. They remade the city for the circulation
of traffic, air, people and capital, as well as facilitated
the policing of the population. Even at the time they were
often criticized for supposedly deadening the life of the
streets and rendering them boring, devoid of surprises, as
well as for destroying ‘old Paris’ and displacing
huge numbers of people along class lines to create new segregations.
Yet avoiding the authoritarian hand of planners and builders
doesn’t necessarily mean avoiding authoritarian ordering
processes, as the market and capitalist development function
that way too. What might seem random is produced through
creative and destructive forces of capital investment and
disinvestment in conjunction with the actions of planners,
citizen struggles and the like. I think that’s worth
stressing as it sometimes seemed forgotten in the chorus
of criticisms directed at utopian planners and their ‘totalizing’ schemes
that grew in strength from the 1970s, especially with the
rise of a ‘postmodern’ urbanism and architecture
whose avowedly anti-utopian stance frequently involved embracing
the market and commercial interests.

Constant’s New Babylon project is interesting in relation
to your question about order vs chaos, though, since he rejects
the kinds of static order often associated with urban utopias
and seems to embrace instead a kind of chaotic flux. Through
models and drawings he outlines these giant megastructures
but stresses that everything within them is fluid and changing,
all the components are perpetually being modified including
walls, stairs, climates, atmospheres. This particularly comes
through in his drawings and paintings with their swirling
and clashing lines. However, the important point for him
is that the environment is continually recreated by the residents
themselves. Unlike utopian designers mapping out the perfect
space, he imagines people freed from the binds of work and
toil and finally able to expend their creative energy through
play and through the creation and recreation of their own
spaces. In that sense the spatial form of the new urbanism
can’t be known in advance of the actions that will
produce and reproduce it.

There is the symbolism of walls that you deal
with quite interestingly. In the very beginning of your
book
you discuss
the utopian visions of the Letterists. The notion of barriers,
protection, isolation comes through vividly in the images
and descriptions. Walls and utopias seem to exist side by
side. Walls keep some things in and other things out – like
semi-permeable membranes. City walls offer protection Walls
can also be ghettos. Utopia for some is tearing down walls – and
for others it is putting them up. Lisa Selvidge in her piece
on the Berlin Wall, writes of its psychosexuality. Helena
Walsh makes use of the Wailing Wall in her piece on Jerusalem.
How far can we go with this? Is it simply a metaphor or is
there something more basic?

Walls,
borders and boundaries are indeed important in many utopias,
given their emphasis on spatial ordering. As you
say, the role of these walls is often ambiguous, both protective
and restrictive. We might think here of the importance of
the perimeter in Thomas More’s vision of the island
of Utopia from 1516, which is rugged and fortified with a
treacherous entrance. Turreted walls, ditches and moats also
surround the cities. These strong walls and boundaries ensure
the purity of the harmonious space inside and allow threats
and contaminations to be kept at bay. That is a classic utopian
image. But in dramatic contrast are the moving and fluid
walls of Constant’s urban vision that I just mentioned,
where there’s a conscious attempt to challenge notions
of exclusion and regulation in favour of a generalized process
of liberation in which people will create their own environments
in correspondence with their life play. The latter connects
with a range of avant-garde architectural experimentation
from the 1960s that challenges the authority of walls and
the idea of the architect as a creator of order and form.

There’s a disturbing footnote to be added here though,
which indicates how critical ideas and visions can be appropriated
for other ends. In his remarkable new book Hollow Land, the
architect Eyal Weizman examines the spaces created by Israel’s
occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, and tells a extraordinary
story about how a research unit within the Israeli Defense
Forces used critical theory to inform its understanding of
urban warfare. One of their key tactics, employed in Nablus
in April 2002 to maneuvre through the city in order to kill
members of the Palestinian resistance, was what they called ‘walking
through walls’: literally blasting through the walls
of private homes using explosives or hammers, and detaining
the residents while then blasting through the other side.
It was a means of moving through space to reach the enemy
without using the conventional urban syntax of streets, alleys
and courtyards that were perceived as dangerous. In passing
through walls and borders as if they no longer mattered,
the army spoke approvingly of creating ‘smooth spaces’,
a term taken from Deleuze and Guattari, in place of the ‘striated
space’ associated with the walls, roadblocks, ditches
and the like that characterized Palestinian areas. Weizman
also discusses the development of methods and technologies
to allow soldiers to see and shoot through walls. Besides
Deleuze and Guattari, the unit’s ‘operational
theory’ curriculum included Tschumi, Debord and the
situationists. It’s strange to imagine the military
reading these theorists, although perhaps it’s not
so surprising in itself given that a number of the theorists
in turn drew on military thinking. Debord, for example, was
fascinated with Clausewitz, Sun Tzu and war games. The real
importance of the theory for the military, Weizman argues,
was as a means of reorganising itself and speaking to itself
and others. But it still casts a different light on the desire
to undermine solid structures and walls apparent in critiques
of capitalist urbanism by the situationists and Constant,
as ideas and practices conceived as part of a project to
subvert power in cities are reworked in order to project
power with devastating consequences for the citizens concerned.

In his article, Alphaville Exists, Chris Darke
discusses the gated communities in Brazil where the workers – the
maids, the gardeners, the cleaners – are under constant
scrutiny, their every move recorded and archived. Does the
idea of safety for a certain class mean oppression for another?
More widely, what do we make of contemporary urban architecture
and surveillance that responds to the threat, real or perceived,
of others? Public buildings, public places, are now special
zones where space is patrolled through various technological
means.

I look forward to reading Chris’s article, for that
theme certainly resonates with wider process of urban restructuring
at the moment. There’s a tendency for cities to become
increasingly segmented and patchwork-like, divided into zones
that are close by physically but worlds apart socially and
institutionally. Gated communities can be seen as an example
of this alongside a range of exclusive spaces such spectacular
malls, waterfront developments, luxury holiday complexes
and so on. Discourses of safety and security are frequently
used to justify a whole series of measures of surveillance,
sorting, exclusion and control that are important in the
production and reproduction of these spaces. Yet the greater
the levels of exclusion, it seems, the more heightened become
the fears. In discussing such spaces I’ve found Louis
Marin’s term ‘utopic degeneration’ useful,
where it indicates a kind of displacement of utopian desires
for urban change into something that is turned inwards, cut
off from surrounding areas, no longer intent on affecting
wider change.

I’m currently getting increasingly interested in these
issues of surveillance myself and especially in the video
surveillance of public space, for which the UK has the dubious
honour of being world capital, and about which there has
been disconcertingly little critical public debate. Surveillance
is actually a common theme in many utopias historically,
with transparency being seen as an important means of maintaining
order and harmony. For example, the residents of More’s
island of Utopia are meant to live in full view of all, with
no chances for idleness, corruption and secret meetings.
In James Silk Buckingham’s nineteenth-century ideal
town of Victoria, an important influence on Howard’s
garden city, everything is visible so there are ‘no
secret and obscure haunts for the retirement of the filthy
and the immoral from the public eye’. The current obsession
with the video surveillance of public space seems to give
new form to such dreams of transparency. Only it’s
the targeted public spaces that must be rendered visible
so that people can be categorized, sifted and tracked. Meanwhile
other spaces – the control rooms where the monitoring
is taking place – are opaque, disconnected and out
of reach in another location entirely.

There’s been quite a bit of research on the East End
as an entry point for migrants and as a laboratory in the
study of the processes of assimilation. In the late 19th
century, the East End was the most densely populated piece
of real estate in Europe. It was the most expensive per square
metre. But it also was the poorest per capita. In the 1880s
there used to be tours run by companies to show middle-class
visitors what it was like to live in the urban jungle. The
tours were probably similar to ones where white Europeans
were taken into black African tribal villages to see where
missionaries had supposedly been cooked and eaten. The Jewish
ghettos of London’s East End, however, housed a rich
cultural mix that thrived on communal living patterns. Certainly
there was plenty of misery and hunger. But, in the main,
the ideas of the social reformers were based on notions having
more to do with British colonial attitudes of the time, than
on a more accurate understanding that came, for example,
from books like Zangwill’s Children
of the Ghetto.
Didn’t the utopian ideas of social reformers like William
Morris often suffer from perceptual flaws that even for radicals
like him were trapped in the notions of Empire?

Not
only imperial imaginations we might add, although what you
say is very interesting in relation to explorations of
the ‘terra incognitae’ of the East End and their
subsequent importance for urban planning imaginaries, but
also assumptions about gender and much more. Yes, utopian
texts and works are always situated in particular contexts
and they, therefore, reflect to some degree the circumstances
in which they were constructed. That’s one of the interesting
things about studying utopias, I think, since their struggles
to imagine a break with the present and to outline other
worlds can tell us much about the conditions of the time,
and about the structural impediments on imagining and realizing
the world otherwise. Some critics go so far as to suggest
that the most significant subject of utopian writing actually
lies in the attempt and ultimate failure to conceive utopia,
the essential incapacity to produce a vision that is the
complete other to what is. The emphasis is, therefore, more
on the process and struggle to imagine, than on the content
of what is imagined.

Your insistence on viewing utopia as a transcendental
idea that evolves and shifts according to perspective,
allows
for an argument on the nature of art and the important process
that is set in motion by the integration of art and the intellect.
This is a crucially important theme – something that
has been lost in most contemporary studies. But I wonder
how this then relates to the question of institutional control
of serious discourse. As intellectual space has become dominated
by the university and university publications, do you think
it’s become much more difficult to be a ‘Constant’ or
a ‘Lefebvre’?

To address these questions of institutional control and intellectual
space, I feel there’s a need to situate them within
wider processes that involve media networks and cultural
production, neoliberalisation and spectacular power. Also
important are the oppositional actions of social movements.
These seem to me to be fundamental areas to address when
considering how utopian projects might – or might not – find
wider resonance in the world today, if I’ve understood
your question correctly. Of course universities are part
of that and, as someone working within one myself, I think
it’s vital that there’s vigorous debate and critical
engagement with the consequences and impacts of their current
restructuring, not just in the UK but also around the world.
Yet thinking about the wider frame might help clarify certain
current threats as well as opportunities. I’m thinking,
for example, of how global capital’s current dependency
on digital technology allied to the changing nature of work
for many people, through the development of what some critics
term ‘immaterial labour’ that involves informational
and cultural aspects of the commodity, may be leading not
only to extensions of control and exploitation but also to
new possibilities for appropriation and re-functioning. Much
current exploration of these possibilities is collective
in orientation, involving not specialist artists in the traditional
sense but a more diffuse range of cultural workers and activist
artists. In that regard, it’s perhaps interesting to
recall that, when Constant moved away from COBRA and embarked
on his journey towards New Babylon during the 1950s, he asserted
the need to go beyond individualized notions of the artist
and move towards forms collective construction. It’s
interesting to speculate what he’d make of current
developments were he starting out as an artist today.

In 1968 a member of our small collective in
San Francisco had just returned from Paris clutching a
pamphlet
from a
hitherto unknown organisation called the Situationist International
that referred to a planned series of activities slated to
happen simultaneously in a number of cities in Europe and
America which was to be known as ‘Ten Days that Shook
the Empire’. It looked good to us as we were tired
of trying to write the perfect leaflet that would explain,
in yet more visceral terms, why America was in Vietnam and
why it shouldn’t be there. So, in an enormous burst
of energy, we built a cardboard city over the central green
of our university campus with signposted paths that took
those who entered into what we called ‘the game of
life’ through the logical consequences (or what we
thought were the logical consequences) of choosing one route
rather than another. The project was a great success and
our little group of a dozen momentarily mushroomed into thousands,
but when ten days had passed and the empire had been little
shaken, we went back to writing occasional leaflets. However,
the power of that moment remained with us and some from our
ranks later joined with the Mime Troupe and other agitprop
groupings to incite the masses by popping up in improbable
places and doing skits where the actors merged into everyday
life situations – only more so – to squeeze out
what we called back then ‘the essential contradictions.’ Later,
having come to live in Europe, I found there was an easy
bond between the ‘Soixante-huiters’ whether they
were from New York, Paris, London or Prague. We all had one
slogan in common – a single idea that reigned over
all the other rhetorical ones – and that was ‘All
power to the imagination!’ That, above all, was the
spirit of ’68. All things were possible if you could
but imagine them.

In
the late 1950s the Situationists, themselves, proposed to
construct a labyrinth in the old market area of Les Halles,
in central Paris, for ‘ludic education’. Partly
it was in response to development plans that promised to
sweep away the markets, and partly it was meant to give glimpses
of other potential uses of space. Your story brings up that
question we discussed earlier, about what lives on from fleeting
events and interventions. It’s often easy to dismiss
temporary interventions but, as you say, they can galvanise
actions beyond the moment itself and the memory for those
who participate or come across the event can remain important.

Particularly interesting to me is the potential power of
intervening in spaces, through both temporary interventions
and also longer lasting constructions. In that light, from
the period you’re talking about I’m actually
more drawn to the slogan ‘Under the paving stones,
the beach!’ Of course, it has become a cliché of ‘68
but it brings out, so well, the sense that other worlds are
not only possible but also close by – that they’re
within reach, and that through action and struggle they may
be realized. That geographical imagination is invaluable
for thinking about cities as fields of possibility, as was
shown by many of the actions around ‘68, and as many
contemporary social movements demonstrate through their creative
and joyful interventions in streets and public spaces to
contest powerful forces and assert rights to the city. Although
my book deals with historical materials and certainly doesn’t
pretend to provide solutions, one of my hopes in exploring
aspects of past movements is that it might contribute to
stoking utopian spirits today.

Visions
of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentiety-Century
Urbanism by
David Pinder, University of Edinburgh Press,
2005ISBN: 0 7486 1488 5